We’ve Come To This
My mother’s first language was Spanish. For the rest of her life, as a completely bilingual woman, she spoke English with a beautiful lyric quality — you could hear the music of Spanish underneath every sentence. But she never forgot her roots, and her rich heritage would surface, unbidden, in idioms she’d carried with her from childhood.
I remember her calling someone “mal educado.” Poorly educated. It had nothing to do with academic degrees and everything to do with how one was raised within a family — whether a person carried honesty, integrity, and virtue into the world. One could hold every diploma imaginable and still be, in her eyes, mal educado.
I thought of that expression yesterday, listening to Senator Bernie Moreno grill Dr. Anthony Fauci in the most vile and uncivil manner I would ever have dreamed of hearing from a sitting senator. “Who the f*ck do you think you were for doing that?” Moreno demanded, after Fauci once again invoked his Fifth Amendment right. “It is a total disgrace what you did to this country.” His rant has by now traveled widely — a moment from what was, in substance, a witch hunt of a hearing.
It’s worth noting: Senator Moreno’s official biography lists a B.A. in business administration from the University of Michigan. For years, he also claimed an MBA from that same institution — until the university confirmed he holds no such degree, and the senator’s office attributed the discrepancy to a staffer’s “error.”
The tenor of this language in a public hearing room is becoming all too prevalent. F-bombs are dropping with a casualness that would have been unthinkable in the Senate not long ago. One wonders whether these men have taken their cue from the one who sits behind the Resolute Desk, for whom the word functions almost as a verbalized pause. On the very same day Moreno was flinging his epithet at Dr. Fauci, President Trump told Fox News, regarding Iran, that the United States was “going to beat the fucking shit out of them.”
Degrees abound in Washington — though some, it turns out, are specious and disingenuous. But abundance of credentials is not the same thing as formation. It appears that many in the present administration, from the president down through the Senate, are, in my mother’s sense of the word, mal educado.
My mother never graduated from high school. She remains, to this day, a fount of wisdom I have yet to exhaust.
Sadly, many voted in or appointed to public office by this administration have neither credentials nor competency for the positions they assume. Worse, many have personal histories replete with the violence and abuse their language embodies. As has recently come to light, Moreno is one of them — unsafe by any measure. Though his party is deplorably silent on the matter, hopefully the voters will shortly send him packing. That Fauci, a dedicated public servant for so many years, was treated to this performative exhibition is beyond appalling. “Mal educado” indeed. Don’t know the idiomatic Spanish for “poor character,” but that also applies. Maybe your mother’s elegant expression covers it all.
I am grateful to your dear Mother for her dignity, wisdom and ability to say with two words what this pitiful man cannot seem to realize about himself. Dr. Fauci is gaining more and more stature with each attempt to undermine him.